As of 1 January 2018, there are 122,289 (ISC)² members holding the CISSP certification worldwide, in 166 countries with the United States holding the highest member count at 79,617 members.[1] In June 2004, the CISSP designation was accredited under the ANSI ISO/IEC Standard 17024:2003.[2][3] It is also formally approved by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) in both their Information Assurance Technical (IAT) and Managerial (IAM) categories for their DoDD 8570 certification requirement.[4] The CISSP has been adopted as a baseline for the U.S. National Security Agency's ISSEP program. CISSP is a globally recognized certification in the field of IT security.[5]

Finding subdomains is mostly used in penetrations test because they point to different applications and revealing external network ranges used by the target company. Having unsecured subdomain can lead to serious risk to your business and lately, there were a number of security incidents where the IT security expert used subdomains tricks. Also subdomains provide you an ability to analyze internal company structure, business targets and priorities.

We take care of the tedious and time-consuming work that is associated with writing comprehensive cybersecurity documentation. By doing this, we offer a unique service to businesses - we can provide you with semi-customized IT security documentation, based on industry-recognized leading practices that include ISO, NIST, OWASP, CSA and others. This allows you to quickly obtain professionally-written IT security documentation and you have the ability to edit this documentation for your specific needs, since it comes in Microsoft Office formats. This is beyond buying an "IT security policy template" online - these products allow you to have the same level of professional quality documentation that you would expect from hiring an IT security consultant to write it for you. Please take a few minutes and look at the examples to see for yourself!

Our comprehensive written information security documentation includes the policies and standards that businesses need to meet common information security requirements, such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, FACTA, GLBA, as well as unique requirements like FedRAMP and NIST 800-171 compliance. We've been doing this since 2005, so we have a long track record of successfully writing IT security policies and other compliance-related documentation, such as risk assessments, vulnerability assessments and audit templates. Everything we do centers around providing your company a solid set of cybersecurity policies and standards to use as a foundation to build from!

Security: Quad9 blocks against known malicious domains, preventing your computers and IoT devices from connecting malware or phishing sites. Whenever a Quad9 user clicks on a website link or types in an address into a web browser, Quad9 will check the site against the IBM X-Force threat intelligence database of over 40 billion analyzed web pages and images. Quad9 also taps feeds from 18 additional threat intelligence partners to block a large portion of the threats that present risk to end users and businesses alike.

Performance: Quad9 systems are distributed worldwide in more than 70 locations at launch, with more than 160 locations in total on schedule for 2018. These servers are located primarily at Internet Exchange points, meaning that the distance and time required to get answers is lower than almost any other solution. These systems are distributed worldwide, not just in high-population areas, meaning users in less well-served areas can see significant improvements in speed on DNS lookups. The systems are “anycast” meaning that queries will automatically be routed to the closest operational system.

Privacy: No personally-identifiable information is collected by the system. IP addresses of end users are not stored to disk or distributed outside of the equipment answering the query in the local data center. Quad9 is a nonprofit organization dedicated only to the operation of DNS services. There are no other secondary revenue streams for personally-identifiable data, and the core charter of the organization is to provide secure, fast, private DNS.

This is a known issue that affects ESXi 5.0.x. For more information, contact VMWare.

To work around this issue, manually create a CPUID mask for the affected virtual machines. To do this, follow these steps:

Turn off the virtual machine.
Right-click the virtual machine, and then click Edit Settings.
Click the Options tab.
Under Advanced, click CPUID Mask.
Click Advanced.
In the Register column, locate the edx register under Level 80000001.
In the Value field, enter the following character string exactly:

----:0---:----:----:----:----:----:----
Click OK two times.

The third-party products that this article discusses are manufactured by companies that are independent of Microsoft. Microsoft makes no warranty, implied or otherwise, about the performance or reliability of these products.

Cocktail is a general purpose utility for macOS that lets you clean, repair and optimize your Mac. It is a powerful digital toolset that helps hundreds of thousands of Mac users around the world get the most out of their computers every day.

The application serves up a perfect mix of maintenance tools and tweaks, all accessible through a clean and easy to use interface. Cocktail's features are arranged into five categories that helps you manage various aspects of your computer. It also comes with an automatic Pilot mode that allows you to simply press a button and relax, knowing that Cocktail will take care of the rest.

Cocktail is installed at more than 250 000 computers world wide. The largest part being private individuals, but Cocktail can also be found at large international companies, educational institutions or newspapers.

If you just want to share the private key, the OpenSSL key generated by your example command is stored in private.pem, and it should already be in PEM format compatible with (recent) OpenSSH. To extract an OpenSSH compatible public key from it, you can just run:

For organisations with a fairly traditional IT Operations department which cannot or will not change rapidly [enough], and for organisations who run all their applications in the public cloud (Amazon EC2, Rackspace, Azure, etc.), it probably helps to treat Operations as a team who simply provides the elastic infrastructure on which applications are deployed and run; the internal Ops team is thus directly equivalent to Amazon EC2, or Infrastructure-as-a-Service.

A team (perhaps a virtual team) within Dev then acts as a source of expertise about operational features, metrics, monitoring, server provisioning, etc., and probably does most of the communication with the IaaS team. This team is still a Dev team, however, following standard practices like TDD, CI, iterative development, coaching, etc.

The IaaS topology trades some potential effectiveness (losing direct collaboration with Ops people) for easier implementation, possibly deriving value more quickly than by trying for Type 1 (Dev and Ops Collaboration) which could be attempted at a later date.
Type 3

Type 3 suitability: organisations with several different products and services, with a traditional Ops department, or whose applications run entirely in the public cloud.

GoAccess was designed to be a fast, terminal-based log analyzer. Its core idea is to quickly analyze and view web server statistics in real time without needing to use your browser (great if you want to do a quick analysis of your access log via SSH, or if you simply love working in the terminal).

While the terminal output is the default output, it has the capability to generate a complete real-time HTML report (great for analytics, monitoring and data visualization), as well as a JSON, and CSV report.

This document provides a practitioner's perspective and contains a set of practical techniques to help IT executives protect an enterprise Active Directory environment. Active Directory plays a critical role in the IT infrastructure, and ensures the harmony and security of different network resources in a global, interconnected environment. The methods discussed are based largely on the Microsoft Information Security and Risk Management (ISRM) organization's experience, which is accountable for protecting the assets of Microsoft IT and other Microsoft Business Divisions, in addition to advising a selected number of Microsoft Global 500 customers.

In AWS, where you don’t have to worry about broadcast domains and all that crap, you do networking differently. For a start, when you create your VPC, you don’t carefully size it for what you need right now (your Wordpress on EC2 tutorial, for example): you size it so that you avoid problems in the future. That means: going big! Cloud networks are, in this way, totally different to non-cloud networks.

duply is a frontend for the mighty duplicity magic. duplicity is a python based shell application that makes encrypted incremental backups to remote storages. Different backends like ftp, sftp, imap, s3 and others are supported. See duplicity manpage for a complete list of backends and features.

A while back, Bryan Kennedy wrote a post describing how he spends the first 5 minutes configuring and securing a new linux server. He runs through the list of commands and configuration settings that address things like:

There were a couple of blog posts in response that took this one step further and demonstrated how to accomplish the same things in a more automated fashion using Ansible. Things move pretty fast and I found both posts were a little outdated. So this post continues the tradition and automates the process using an Ansible playbook. It takes care of the basic things described in these posts with a couple of additions and enhancements.

While I was able to locate a few Password Wordlists that were sorted by popularity, the vast majority of lists, especially the larger lists, were sorted alphabetically. This seems like a major practicality flaw! If we assume that the most common password is password, (which is actually the 2nd most common, after 123456) and we are performing a dictionary attack using an English dictionary, we are going to have to slog from aardvark through passover to get to password. I don't know off the top of my head just how common "aardvark" is as a password - but we could be wasting a lot of time by not starting with the most common password on our list!

I went to SecLists, Weakpass, and Hashes.org and downloaded nearly every single Wordlist containing real passwords I could find. These lists were huge, and I ended up with over 80 GB actual, human-generated and used passwords. These were split up among over 350 files of varying length, sorting scheme, character encoding, origin and other properties. I sorted these files, removed duplicates from within the files themselves, and prepared to join them all together.

Some of these lists were composed of the other lists, and some were exact duplicates. I took care to remove any exact duplicate files - we didn't need to have any avoidable false positives. If a password was found across multiple files, I considered this to be an approximation of its popularity. If an entry was found in 5 files, it wasn't too popular. If an entry could be found in 300 files, it was very popular. Using Unix commands, I concatenated all the files into one giant file representing keys to over 4 billion secret areas on the web, and sorted them by number of appearances in the single file. From this, I was able to create a large wordlist sorted by popularity, not the alphabet.

As a software development company, we are often tasked to create backup scripts to ensure data is recoverable in case of catastrophic failure. I’m sharing below the basic script that we use to some clients that require automated daily backup script in Linux and Amazon S3. This script supports backup of files and database into a local storage and transfer the backup files to Amazon S3.

A lot of information on AWS is already written. Most people learn AWS by reading a blog or a “getting started guide” and referring to the standard AWS references. Nonetheless, trustworthy and practical information and recommendations aren’t easy to come by. AWS’s own documentation is a great but sprawling resource few have time to read fully, and it doesn’t include anything but official facts, so omits experiences of engineers. The information in blogs or Stack Overflow is also not consistently up to date.

This guide is by and for engineers who use AWS. It aims to be a useful, living reference that consolidates links, tips, gotchas, and best practices. It arose from discussion and editing over beers by several engineers who have used AWS extensively.

Below you find a set of charts demonstrating the paths that you can take and the technologies that you would want to adopt in order to become a frontend, backend or a devops. I made these charts for an old professor of mine who wanted something to share with his college students to give them a perspective.

In looking into compromised systems, often what is needed by incident responders and investigators is not enabled or configured when it comes to logging. To help get system logs properly Enabled and Configured, below are some cheat sheets to help you do logging well and so the needed data we all need is there when we look.

Once you have finished the process, the certificates will be stored under /etc/letsencrypt/live/<your.domain>/. You can add your new certificates to the Postfix configuration using the two commands below. Replace the <your.domain> with your email server’s domain name.

dropboxd will create a ~/Dropbox folder and start synchronizing it after this step! Go to the URL given; you should see a success message at the top of your screen.

NOTE: If you want to change the account it is linked to, unlink it from the first account, then kill the running dropbox process, start it up again (with “~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd &”) and obtain the new host_id with dbreadconfig.py . If you don’t restart the dropbox client, it will give the same host_id (which for some reason cause me to be unable to change the account it is linked to).

Whoer.net is a service aimed at verifying the information your computer sends to the web.

It is perfect for checking proxy or socks servers, providing information about your VPN server and scanning black lists for your IP address. The service shows whether your computer enables Flash and Java, as well as its language and system settings, OS and web-browser, define the DNS etc.

The main and the most powerful side of our service is the interactive checking by Java, Flash and WebRTC, allowing to detect the actual system settings and its weaknesses, which can be used by third-party resources to find out the information about your computer.

For your convenience, we have set up two versions of our website: light and extended (for displaying additional information).

fail2ban is a service which parses specified log files and can perform configured actions when a given regexp is found. It's usually used to ban offending IP addresses using iptables rules (only IPv4 connections are supported at the moment).

Installs an iptables-based firewall for Linux. Supports both IPv4 (iptables) and IPv6 (ip6tables).

This firewall aims for simplicity over complexity, and only opens a few specific ports for incoming traffic (configurable through Ansible variables). If you have a rudimentary knowledge of iptables and/or firewalls in general, this role should be a good starting point for a secure system firewall.

After the role is run, a firewall init service will be available on the server. You can use service firewall [start|stop|restart|status] to control the firewall.

This is the last WSUS Script you will ever need. It has the capacity to remove all drivers from the database, remove declined updates, decline superseded updates, run the SQL database maintenance, remove synchronization logs, and finally run the server cleanup wizard.

Synergy combines your desktop devices together in to one cohesive experience. It's software for sharing your mouse and keyboard between multiple computers on your desk. It works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

In 2013 we created the first set of Group Policies to combat Cryptolocker. Since then we’ve continued to expand and improve our IT Best Practices approach to Ransomware Prevention. It now includes documents, policies, recovery keys, and instruction sets for other tools native to Windows Server and Desktop OS’s. We also include suggestions of how you can modernize your network configuration best practices a build a great solution for your clients.

Can you describe your workflow when you create a script?
What is GIT?
What is a dynamically/statically linked file?
What does "configure && make && make install" do?
What is puppet/chef/ansible used for?
What is Nagios/Zenoss/NewRelic used for?
What is the difference between Containers and VMs?
How do you create a new postgres user?
What is a virtual IP address? What is a cluster?
How do you print all strings of printable characters present in a file?
How do you find shared library dependencies?
What is Automake and Autoconf?
./configure shows an error that libfoobar is missing on your system, how could you fix this, what could be wrong?
What are the Advantages/disadvantages of script vs compiled program?
What's the relationship between continuous delivery and DevOps?
What are the important aspects of a system of continuous integration and deployment?

A tiny Bash shell script which uses ipset and iptables to ban a large number of IP addresses published in IP blacklists. ipset uses a hashtable to store/fetch IP addresses and thus the IP lookup is a lot (!) faster than thousands of sequentially parsed iptables ban rules.

This guide was written based on a Windows 8.1 Pro laptop - it should also apply to Windows 7 but some of the screens might be slightly different. It was based partly on the more advanced solution at http://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/Nonprivileged - that will automatically do all the above for any user that logs on so is great for a machine many users could use, or an auto deployment system. As a one off for a single user it is more complicated than required though and the 3 steps above have the same end result.

Some of you may have come out of the womb hacking shell scripts to disable that Internet-enabled baby video surveilliance monitor that your parents used to watch what you're doing on their iPad in the kitchen (visualize eTrade baby hacking away on a terminal app on his Android phone). But, I suspect most of us started more modestly than that and moved up the learning curve (some faster than others). The following is a somewhat fictional, somewhat true recollection.

It has to deal with the eternal question: How do you store sensitive configuration options (such as usernames, passwords, etc.) in source control? Typically what I’ve done is to just punt on the problem entirely. I create a dummy configuration file, such as conf/sample-settings.json which has the basic structure but none of the details filled out. For example:

If someone else needed the details I would just email it to them, or some such (not ideal). Especially when it came time to add additional information to the file or make other changes.

The technique I picked up from Craig was to, instead, keep an encrypted version of the configuration file in source control and then provide a means through which the user can encrypt and decrypt that data.

JAVA Uninstall and cleanup script for through Java 1.7.u11 with install of Java 1.7.u11 x86 and X64 in Mixed Environment
Calls removal of Java Autoupdate after install
Skips Removal of versions of Java 1.6.x if SAS is detected
These can be removed if your environment does not use SAS or uses built in Java for SAS
Requires x86 and x64 JRE Executables and x86 MSI files to install x86 Java on x64
MSI files can be located in
C:\Documents and Settings\<install user>\Application Data\Sun\Java\<version> or
C:\Users\<install user>\Appdata\locallow\Sun\Java\<Version>
after install to a workstation preferably 32-bit
written for use in SCCM 2007, but will likely work elsewhere
Written by David Nelson, Computer Professional, CSBS Computing, University of Utah
2012-2013

lshw (Hardware Lister) is a small tool to provide detailed information on the hardware configuration of the machine. It can report exact memory configuration, firmware version, mainboard configuration, CPU version and speed, cache configuration, bus speed, etc. on DMI-capable x86 or EFI (IA-64) systems and on some PowerPC machines (​PowerMac G4 is known to work).

In almost all cases, only free software is allowed to be featured on PRISM Break. The only exception is when free software offers no viable alternative to proprietary software. "Web search" is the only category with this exception currently.

Quality over quantity. PRISM Break strives to promote the best open source applications. Ease of use, stability, and performance matter. This is the first time many people are looking to leave their proprietary walled gardens. Let's make it a good experience for them. If you're writing a privacy-minded FOSS app, please finish it before asking PRISM Break to promote it.

SystemRescueCd is a Linux system rescue disk available as a bootable CD-ROM or USB stick for administrating or repairing your system and data after a crash. It aims to provide an easy way to carry out admin tasks on your computer, such as creating and editing the hard disk partitions. It comes with a lot of linux software such as system tools (parted, partimage, fstools, ...) and basic tools (editors, midnight commander, network tools). It can be used for both Linux and windows computers, and on desktops as well as servers. This rescue system requires no installation as it can be booted from a CD/DVD drive or USB stick, but it can be installed on the hard disk if you wish. The kernel supports all important file systems (ext2/ext3/ext4, reiserfs, btrfs, xfs, jfs, vfat, ntfs), as well as network filesystems (samba and nfs).

Since the first days Windows Explorer appeared, the list of switches reproduced below has been floating around the internet. I'm not sure who was the first to assemble the list but here it is in its entirety. Play around with it and see if one of the views is what you're seeking. Just copy and paste the bold text into the Target line on the Property Sheet of Windows Explorer. If it's not what you expected you can always switch back to the default view by using C:WINDOWSexplorer.exe in the Target line.

"My Computer" highlighted in left side with all drives visible but not expanded and C: highlighted in right side: %SystemRoot%explorer.exe /e,/select,c:

IPTraf is a console-based network statistics utility for Linux. It gathers a variety of figures such as TCP connection packet and byte counts, interface statistics and activity indicators, TCP/UDP traffic breakdowns, and LAN station packet and byte counts.

Click the "Tor" button to see what data is visible to eavesdroppers when you're using Tor. The button will turn green to indicate that Tor is on.

Click the "HTTPS" button to see what data is visible to eavesdroppers when you're using HTTPS. The button will turn green to indicate that HTTPS is on.

When both buttons are green, you see the data that is visible to eavesdroppers when you are using both tools.

When both buttons are grey, you see the data that is visible to eavesdroppers when you don't use either tool.

Potentially visible data includes: the site you are visiting (SITE.COM), your username and password (USER/PW), the data you are transmitting (DATA), your IP address (LOCATION), and whether or not you are using Tor (TOR).

The Scunthorpe problem occurs when a spam filter or search engine blocks e-mails or search results because their text contains a string of letters that are shared with an obscene word. While computers can easily identify strings of text within a document, broad blocking rules may result in false positives, causing innocent phrases to be blocked.

Rufus is a small utility that helps format and create bootable USB flash drives, such as USB keys/pendrives, memory sticks, etc.

It can be be especially useful for cases where:

you need to create USB installation media from bootable ISOs (Windows, Linux, etc.)
you need to work on a system that doesn't have an OS installed
you need to flash a BIOS or other firmware from DOS
you want to run a low-level utility

pfSense is a free, open source customized distribution of FreeBSD tailored for use as a firewall and router. In addition to being a powerful, flexible firewalling and routing platform, it includes a long list of related features and a package system allowing further expandability without adding bloat and potential security vulnerabilities to the base distribution. pfSense is a popular project with more than 1 million downloads since its inception, and proven in countless installations ranging from small home networks protecting a PC and an Xbox to large corporations, universities and other organizations protecting thousands of network devices.

Keeping a version history of your configuration files is every administrator’s dream. Knowing that you have a complete history of all of your configuration files makes it really easy for system administrators to sleep well at night knowing that if anything goes wrong, they can simply roll back their configuration to an earlier date.

This is all possible with a program called EtcKeeper. EtcKeeper is a revision control system for your /etc directory using bzr, git, hf, or darcs as a back-end. EtcKeeper will allow you to make commits, like any other revision system, that will keep a version history of all your changes to the /etc directory. If configured correctly, you can also use EtcKeeper to check who made configuration changes and at what time, which can be useful for troubleshooting and auditing purposes.

In this article, I am going to show you how you can install and configure EtcKeeper to put your configuration files under version control.

Hi Rob here again. Periodically we’re asked "what is the best way to auto-create home, roaming profile, and folder redirection folders instead of Administrators creating and configuring the NTFS permissions manually?" The techniques in this post requires you to use the environment variable %USERNAME% in the user’s home folder attribute when you create the users account.

We will also make use of the “$” symbol in the share name; which makes the share hidden from anyone who attempts to list the shares on the file server via computer browsing.

HeidiSQL is a lightweight, Windows based interface for managing MySQL and Microsoft SQL databases. It enables you to browse and edit data, create and edit tables, views, procedures, triggers and scheduled events. Also, you can export structure and data either to SQL file, clipboard or to other servers.

JavaRa is a simple tool that does a simple job: it removes old and redundant versions of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). Simply select “Check for Updates” or “Remove Older Version” to begin. JavaRa is free under the GNU GPL version two.

"Open Source Tripwire® software is a security and data integrity tool useful for monitoring and alerting on specific file change(s) on a range of systems. The project is based on code originally contributed by Tripwire, Inc. in 2000."

Symantec Endpoint Protection 11 has got to be one of the worst anti-virus products ever produced. Not only is it a resource hog, but it also will fill your entire hard drive with virus definition updates. I recently switched a client from SEP 11 to Kaspersky, a much better product IMO, and needed to remotely uninstall SEP 11. I wrote a batch file to accomplish the removal of SEP. There are several things you need to make the batch file work:

pstools from Microsoft – psexec is what we’ll be using
Windows 2003 Resource Kit Tools – we’ll be using robocopy
CleanWipe from Symantec – you’ll need to call Symantec support for this one

There may be other ways of getting CleanWipe, but I wouldn’t know about them.

To set up a secure server using public-key cryptography, in most cases, you send your certificate request (including your public key), proof of your company's identity, and payment to a CA. The CA verifies the certificate request and your identity, and then sends back a certificate for your secure server. Alternatively, you can create your own self-signed certificate.